Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash
This year’s FIFA World Cup has been a lot of fun to watch. I haven’t seen every match (let alone most matches), but I’m finding myself somewhat appreciative to have it on my television for the first time. Baseball had my full attention in the summer months, basically up through the 2014 or 2018 tournament, and I don’t think I’ve ever given international soccer more than an hour of my attention.
I’ve got the biggest soccer tournament on my TV this year, but I’d also be lying if I said I’ve been paying attention to every match, too. Obviously, I’m very passive about this sport, and I recognize that this tournament’s broken up into two parts.
First, you have the spectacle.
Then, you raise the stakes.
THE SPECTACLE
This World Cup is the first to field an expansion from 32 to 48 teams. Instead of 64 total games over 32 games, this year’s tournament offers 104 games crunched in 39 days. Over the last two weeks, there have been all-day marathons of this sport; as many as four games a day, and sometimes with 10 PM or later start times (local to me, that is).
It’s an all-day, weeks-long marathon of soccer played all across North America, and this tournament has become, at least so far, an early stamp of approval of FIFA for today’s Americans. The US team being good and interesting certainly doesn’t hurt the sport’s popularity right now, either.
You know what else doesn’t hurt the sport’s popularity? A bunch of Scottish people singing Country Roads at a Boston bar.
You know what else doesn’t hurt the sport’s popularity? A bunch of Norwegians — and God bless them for this — taking in a Mets-Cubs game.
And South Korea at Mexico, of course, has been the best cultural crossover of the tournament.
Whether you’re in it for the soccer or you’re in it for the party, the World Cup’s giving everybody at home something to witness and enjoy. And because of expansion, the global parties across North America have gone on a little bit longer than they have in the past.
The spectacle portion of the World Cup receives an immediate passing grade from me, because it looks like thousands and thousands of people really enjoyed themselves.
Not everybody was in favor of it.
Ghana’s head coach, Carlos Queiroz, sees expansion as a gimmick:
Speaking to the media after Ghana’s 2-1 defeat to Croatia in Philadelphia on Saturday, Queiroz said: “I believe that value comes when things are rare.
“The number of teams that can qualify for this competition can turn it into something vulgar and ordinary. When so many teams can qualify, is the value still rare? That would seem debatable to me but it is only my opinion.”
That sounds similar, because that’s the same kind of argument we keep hearing when the CFP was introduced, and again when it expanded from four teams to 12.
Convincing people that we need a 24-team playoff is going to take some time.
Are expanded playoff gimmicks?
Do we need to keep pretending that there are all these teams able to win a big tournament at the end of the season?
Is anybody actually pretending that Ghana or Paraguay or DR Congo are going to end up beating Argentina or France or Spain, though?
THE SPORTS
This is where the juice gets made. Group play was great and all, but now we’re down to 32 teams left standing.
Not the 32 best teams. Not the 32 top-ranked teams after hours of deliberation and voting. We started this World Cup with 48 teams, and 16 have been bounced. This is where a proper tournament begins with 32 remaining teams that qualified through weeks of group play after years of tournaments and other qualifying matches. One could lose a match in group play and still move on, but not in the knockout round. It’s, like I said, a proper tournament: you play until you lose.
Which, if you’re Argentina or France or Spain going up against a vastly inferior opponent in the knockout round: you’ve got 90-plus minutes to prove everybody correct on that assessment.
Who’s in the conversation at this point, for me, the casual, isn’t important. What’s important is that the quality of play simply gets better and better with each passing round.
That’s how all sports tournaments should go.
Though, the World Cup and College Football Playoff can’t operate the same way for a lot of simple reasons.
The World Cup is played every four years, whereas the college championship is played every year.
The qualifying process for the World Cup takes three years, and every team has a chance to make it in if they simply win enough. The college football playoff has a committee that comes up with a Top 25 ranking every week during the final handful of weeks of the regular season, and everybody’s records are argued differently (especially when they come from weaker conferences).
The teams that make the championship game in the World Cup will have played eight matches in five weeks, and that’s simply not a pace American football’s going to be played at.
The World Cup is also being played in the summer, and American life is more open to enjoying soccer without school or big holidays to plan around. College football’s playoff comes at a time when a lot of Americans are busy with the marathon of holidays in November, December, and January.
College football season has its spectacle — the regular season (September’s a great time to check out a new stadium!), and the sport certainly feels like its stakes are at its highest during November with popular rivalry games and conference races coming to a close. But the sport’s not at its best after November, far from it.
Playoff expansion will certainly add instant excitement to fans’ lives, but college football’s schedule doesn’t lend itself to pointing to FIFA for simple solutions.